Attenuation Bias in Measuring the Wage Impact of Immigration. Abdurrahman Aydemir and George J. Borjas Statistics Canada and Harvard University

Transcription

1 Attenuation Bias in Measuring the Wage Impact of Immigration Abdurrahman Aydemir and George J. Borjas Statistics Canada and Harvard University November 2006

2 1 Attenuation Bias in Measuring the Wage Impact of Immigration Abdurrahman Aydemir and George J. Borjas ABSTRACT Although economic theory predicts that there should be an inverse relation between relative wages and immigrant-induced labor supply shifts, many empirical studies have found it difficult to document such effects. We argue that the weak evidence may be partly due to sampling error in the most commonly used measure of the supply shift: the fraction of the workforce that is foreign-born. Sampling error plays a disproportionately large role because the typical study is longitudinal, measuring how wages adjust as immigrants enter a particular labor market. After controlling for permanent factors that determine wages in specific labor markets, there is little variation remaining in the immigrant share. Because the immigrant share is a proportion, its sampling error can be easily derived from the properties of the hypergeometric distribution. Using data for both the Canadian and U.S. labor markets, we find that there is significant measurement error in this measure of immigrant supply shifts, and that correcting for the attenuation bias can substantially increase existing estimates of the wage impact of immigration.

3 2 Attenuation Bias in Measuring the Wage Impact of Immigration Abdurrahman Aydemir and George J. Borjas I. Introduction The textbook model of a competitive labor market has clear and unambiguous implications about how wages should adjust to an immigrant-induced labor supply shift, at least in the short run. In particular, higher levels of immigration should lower the wage of competing workers and increase the wage of complementary workers. Despite the common-sense intuition behind these predictions, the economics literature has found it difficult to document the inverse relation between wages and immigrant-induced supply shifts. Much of the literature estimates the labor market impact of immigration in a receiving country by comparing economic conditions across local labor markets in that country. Although there is a great deal of dispersion in the measured impact across studies, the estimates tend to cluster around zero. This finding has been interpreted as indicating that immigration has little impact on the receiving country s wage structure. 1 One problem with this interpretation is that the spatial correlation the correlation between labor market outcomes and immigration across local labor markets may not truly capture the wage impact of immigration if native workers (or capital) respond by moving their Dr. Aydemir is a Senior Economist at Statistics Canada; Dr. Borjas is a Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. We are grateful to Alberto Abadie, Joshua Angrist, Sue Dynarski, Richard Freeman, Daniel Hamermesh, Larry Katz, Robert Moffitt, and Douglas Staiger for very helpful discussions and comments. This paper represents the views of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Statistics Canada. 1 Representative studies include Altonji and Card (1991), Borjas (1987), Borjas, Freeman, and Katz (1997), Card (1991, 2001), Grossman (1982), LaLonde and Topel (1991), Pischke and Velling (1997), and Schoeni (1997). Friedberg and Hunt (1995) and Smith and Edmonston (1997) survey the literature.

4 3 inputs to localities seemingly less affected by the immigrant supply shock. 2 Because these flows arbitrage regional wage differences, the wage impact of immigration may only be measurable at the national level. Borjas (2003) used this insight to examine if the evolution of wages in particular skill groups defined in terms of both educational attainment and years of work experience were related to the immigrant supply shocks affecting those groups. In contrast to the local labor market studies, the national labor market evidence indicated that wage growth was strongly and inversely related to immigrant-induced supply increases. A number of papers have already replicated the national-level approach, with mixed results. These initial replications, therefore, seem to suggest that the national labor market approach may find itself with as many different types of results as the spatial correlation approach that it conceptually and empirically attempted to replace. For example, Mishra (2003) applies the framework to the Mexican labor market and finds significant positive wage effects of emigration on wages in Mexico. On the other hand, Bonin (2005) applies the framework to the German labor market and reports a very weak impact of supply shifts on the wage structure. Aydemir and Borjas (2005) apply the approach to both Canadian and Mexican Census data and find a strong inverse relation between wages and immigrant-induced supply shifts. In contrast, Bohn and Sanders (2005) use publicly available Canadian data and report near-zero factor price elasticities for the Canadian labor market. 2 The literature has not reached a consensus on whether native workers respond to immigration by voting with their feet and moving to other areas. Filer (1992), Frey (1995), and Borjas (2006) find a strong internal migration response, while Card (2001) and Kritz and Gurak (2001) find little connection between native migration and immigration. Alternative modes of market adjustment are studied by Lewis (2005), who examines the link between immigration and the input mix used by firms, and Saiz (2003), who examines how rental prices adjusted to the Mariel immigrant influx. It is worth noting that the spatial correlation will also be positively biased if incomemaximizing immigrants choose to locate in high-wage areas, creating a spurious correlation between immigrant supply shocks and wages.

5 4 This paper argues that the differences in estimated coefficients across the fast-growing set of national labor market studies, as well as many of the very weak coefficients reported in the spatial correlation literature, may well be explained by a simple statistical fact: There is a lot of sampling error in the measures of the immigrant supply shift commonly used in the literature, and this sampling error leads to substantial attenuation bias in the estimated wage impact of immigration. Measurement error plays a central role in these studies because of the longitudinal nature of the empirical exercise that is conducted. Immigration is often measured by the immigrant share, the fraction of the workforce in a particular labor market that is foreign-born. The analyst then typically examines the relation between the wage and the immigrant share within a particular labor market. To net out market-specific wage effects, the study includes various vectors of fixed effects (e.g., regional fixed effects or skill-level fixed effects) that absorb these permanent factors. The inclusion of these fixed effects implies that there is very little identifying variation left in the variable that captures the immigrant supply shift, permitting the sampling error in the immigrant share to play a disproportionately large role. As a result, even very small amounts of sampling error get magnified and easily dominate the remaining variation in the immigrant share. Because the immigrant share variable is a proportion, its sampling error can be easily derived from the properties of the hypergeometric distribution. The statistical properties of this random variable provide a great deal of information that can be used to measure the extent of attenuation bias in these types of models as well as to construct relatively simple corrections for measurement error.

6 5 Our empirical analysis uses data for both Canada and the United States to show the numerical importance of sampling error in attenuating the wage impact of immigration. We have access to the entire Census files maintained by Statistics Canada. These Census files represent a sizable sampling of the Canadian population: a 33.3 percent sample in 1971 and a 20 percent sample thereafter. 3 The application of the national labor market model proposed by Borjas (2003) to these entire samples reveals a significant negative correlation between wages of specific skill groups and immigrant supply shifts. It turns out, however, that when the identical regression is estimated in smaller samples (even on those that are publicly released by Statistics Canada), the regression coefficient is numerically much smaller and much less likely to be statistically significant. We also find the same pattern of attenuation bias in our study of U.S. Census data. A regression model estimated on the largest samples available (e.g., the post percent samples) reveals significant effects, but the effects become exponentially weaker as the analyst calculates the immigrant share on progressively smaller samples. II. Framework We are interested in estimating the wage impact of immigration by looking at wage variation across labor markets. The labor markets may be defined in terms of skills, geographic regions, and time. The available data has been aggregated to the level of the labor market and typically reports the wage level and the size of the immigrant supply shock in each market. The generic regression model estimated in much of the literature can be summarized as: 3 These confidential files are the largest available micro data files in Canada that provide information on citizenship, immigration, schooling, labor market activities, and earnings.

7 6 (1) w = + X +, k k h kh k h where w k gives the log wage in labor market k (k = 1,,K); k gives the immigrant share in the labor market (i.e. the fraction of the workforce that is foreign-born); the variables in the vector X are control variables that may include period fixed effects, region fixed effects, skill fixed effects, and any other variables that generate differences in wage levels across labor markets; and is an i.i.d. error term, with mean 0 and variance 2. A crucial characteristic of this type of empirical exercise is that the analyst typically calculates the immigrant share from the microdata available for labor market k. This type of calculation inevitably introduces sampling error in the key independent variable in equation (1), and introduces the possibility that the coefficient may be inconsistently estimated. To fix ideas, suppose initially that all other variables in the regression model are measured correctly. Suppose further that the only type of measurement error in the observed immigrant share p k is the one that arises due to sampling error and not to any possible misclassification of workers by immigrant status. 4 The relation between the observed immigrant share and the true immigrant share in the labor market is given by: (2) p k = k + u k. 4 It is likely that the results reported in many studies (particularly those conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s) are also contaminated by a different type of measurement error. In particular, these studies often examined the impact of immigrant supply shocks on the wage of particular skill groups, such as high school dropouts. However, the measure of the immigrant supply shock used in these studies often ignored the skill composition of the foreign-born workforce and was simply defined as the immigrant share in the labor market (see, for example, Altonji and Card, 1991; Borjas, 1987; and LaLonde and Topel, 1991). It is well known that the skill distribution of immigrant workers in the United States varies across cities and regions, so this specification is unlikely to capture the true wage impact of immigration.

8 7 When the data sample of size n k is obtained by sampling with replacement from a population of size N k, the observed immigrant share is the mean of a sample of independent Bernoulli draws, so that E(u k ) = 0 and Var(u k ) = k (1 - k )/n k. Census sampling, however, is without replacement and the error term in (2) has a hypergeometric distribution with E(u k ) = 0 and k(1 k) Nk nk Var( uk ) =. n N 1 k k The size of the population in the labor market, N k, is not typically observed, but the expected value of the ratio n k /N k is known and is the sampling rate () that generates the Census sample (e.g., a 1/1000 sample). We approximate the variance of the error term in (2) by Var(u k ) = (1- ) k (1 - k )/n k. Note that the variance of the sampling error has a simple binomial structure for very small sampling rates. 5 Further, u k and k are mean-independent, implying Cov( k, u k ) = 0. We will show below that the statistical properties of the sampling error have important implications for the size of the attenuation bias in estimates of the wage impact of immigration. They also provide relatively simple ways for correcting the estimates for the impact of measurement error. 5 Conversely, for very large sampling rates the sample approximates the population and there is little sampling error in the observed measure of the immigrant share.

9 8 It is well known that the probability limit of ˆ in a multivariate regression model when only the regressor p k is measured with error is: 6 (3) 1 plim plim ˆ k = 1 (1 R ) u 2 k k 2 2 p, where 2 p is the variance of the observed immigrant share across the K labor markets, and R 2 is the multiple correlation of an auxiliary regression that relates the observed immigrant share to all other right-hand-side variables in the model. The term 2 2 (1 R ) p, therefore, gives the variance of the observed immigrant share that remains unexplained after controlling for all other variables in the regression model. As noted above, the typical study in the literature pools data on particular labor markets over time and adds fixed effects that net out persistent wage effects in labor market k as well as period effects. This type of regression model, of course, is equivalent to differencing the data so that the wage impact of immigration is identified from within-market changes in the immigrant share. The multiple correlation of the auxiliary regression in this type of longitudinal study will typically be very high, usually above 0.9. As a result, much of the systematic variation in the immigrant share is explained away, and the measurement error introduced by the sampling error plays a disproportionately large role in the estimation. 6 Maddala (1992, pp ) presents a particularly simple derivation of equation (3) when the regression has two explanatory variables; see also Cameron and Trivedi (2005, p. 904), Garber and Keppler (1980), and Levi (1973). Bound, Brown and Mathiowetz (2001) provide an excellent survey of the measurement error literature.

10 9 It can be shown that the probability limit of the average of the square of error terms in (3) is: (4) 1 (1 ) u = E 2 k k plim k (1 ), k k nk where the expectation in (4) is taken across the K labor markets. Combining results, we can write: (5) ˆ E[ k(1 k)/ n ] k plim = 1 (1 ). 2 2 (1 R ) p Equation (5) imposes an important restriction on the magnitude of the measurement error. Note that the expected sampling error given by (4) must be less than the unexplained portion of the variance in the immigrant share (in other words, the variance due to measurement error cannot be larger than the variance that remains after controlling for other observable characteristics). This restriction implies that in situations where sampling error tends to be large and where there is little variance left in the immigrant share after controlling for variation in the other variables, the classical errors-in-variables model may be uninformative and it may be impossible to retrieve information about the value of the true parameter from observed data. This restriction is often violated when the immigrant share is calculated in relatively small samples. The violations may arise for two reasons. First, any calculation of the expected sampling error in (5) requires that we approximate the true immigrant share k with the observed

11 10 immigrant share p k. This approximation introduces errors, making it possible for the estimate of the expected sampling error to exceed the adjusted variance in small samples. Second, we assumed that the only source of measurement error in the observed immigrant share is sampling error. There could well be other types of errors, such as classification errors of immigrant status (Aigner, 1973; Freeman, 1981; and Kane, Rouse, and Staiger, 1999). In relatively small samples, where the sampling error already accounts for a very large fraction of the adjusted variance, even a minor misclassification problem could easily lead to a violation of the restriction implied by equation (5). It is useful to present an approximation to equation (5) that gives a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the quantitative impact of attenuation bias. In particular, suppose that we calculate the average sampling error so that larger cells count more than smaller cells. Define the weight k = n k /n T, where n T gives the total sample size across all K labor markets. We can then rewrite the expectation in (4) as: (6) k(1 ) k k(1 k) E = k nk k nk nk k(1 k) = n n k T k E[ k(1 k)] =, n where n (= n T /K) is the per-cell number of observations used to calculate the immigrant share in the various labor markets. It is easy to show that E[ k (1 - k )] can be closely approximated by

12 11 the expression p(1 p), where p is the average observed immigrant share across the K labor markets. 7 We can then rewrite equation (5) as: (7) plim ˆ 1 (1 ) p(1 p) / n (1 2 ) 2 R p Equation (7) implies that the percent bias generated by sampling error is given by: p(1 p) / n (8) Percent bias (1 ). 2 2 (1 R ) p The immigrant share in the United States is around 0.1, and we will show below that the variance in the immigrant share across national labor markets defined on the basis of skills (in particular, schooling and work experience) is approximately Finally (and not surprisingly), the explanatory power of the auxiliary regression of the immigrant share on all the other variables in the model (such as fixed effects for education and experience) is very high, on the order of Figure 1 illustrates the predicted size of the bias as a function of the per-cell sample size when the sampling rate is small ( 0). It is evident that even when the immigrant share is calculated using 1,000 observations per cell there is a remarkably high level of attenuation in the coefficient. In particular, the percent bias is 45 percent when the average cell has 1,000 7 The difference between (1 ) / n and E[ k(1 k)]/ n equals approximation, therefore, is quite good for any reasonable value of n. 2 n = E k The /,where ( ).

13 12 observations, 60 percent when there are 750 observations, 75 percent when there are 600 observations, and the coefficient is completely driven to zero when there are 450 observations. 8 The figure also reports the results of a similar calculation with data from the Canadian labor market. In Canada, the immigrant share is around 0.2, and we will show below that the variance in the immigrant share across national labor markets (defined by education and experience) is around The R 2 of the auxiliary regression is again around The fact that the immigrant share is twice as large in Canada implies that the bias is higher than in the United States for a given mean cell size. In particular, the percent bias is 64 percent when the average cell has 1,000 observations, 85.3 percent when there are 750 observations, and sampling error completely overwhelms the data when there are fewer than 640 observations. It is also worth noting that the hypergeometric distribution of the sampling error combined with the fact that the longitudinal nature of the exercise removes much of the identifying variation in the immigrant share implies a noticeable bias even when there are as many as 10,000 observations per cell: the percent bias is then 6.4 percent in Canada and 4.5 percent in the United States. Because many of the recent empirical studies in the literature use the seemingly large Public Use Samples of the U.S. Census (which contain individual observations for a 5 percent sample of the population since 1980), it may seem that the number of observations used to calculate the immigrant share is likely to be far higher than just a few hundred (or even a few thousand), so that the attenuation problem would be relatively minor. It turns out, however, that once the analyst begins to define the labor market in ever-narrower terms (e.g., skill groups or occupations within a geographic area), it is quite easy for even these very large 5 percent files to 8 The bias cannot be calculated if the average cell size is less than 450. The implied amount of measurement error would then be larger than the unexplained variance in the immigrant share.

14 13 yield relatively small samples for the average cell and the attenuation bias can easily become numerically important. Finally, our analysis assumes that the immigrant share is the only mismeasured variable in the regression model. Deaton (1985) suggests that there may be non-classical errors because the immigrant share is unlikely to be the only variable that is measured less precisely as the cell size gets smaller. The dependent variable (the mean of the log wage in market k) also is measured more imprecisely in smaller samples. In some contexts, Deaton (1985) shows that the sampling error between the dependent and independent variables could be correlated. Such a correlation, however, does not exist in our context. To see why, consider the nature of the sampling error in the immigrant share. Suppose we happen to sample too many natives in market k, underestimating the true immigrant share. What is the impact of this sampling error on the calculated mean (log) earnings of native workers in that market? Each additional native that was over-sampled was drawn at random from the population of natives in market k. As a result, the expected value of the earnings of the over-sampled natives equals the average earnings of natives in market k, implying that the sampling error in mean log earnings is independent from the sampling error in the immigrant share. III. Data and Results We use microdata Census files for both Canada and the United States to illustrate the quantitative importance of attenuation bias in estimating the wage impact of immigration. Our study of the Canadian labor market uses all available files from the Canadian Census (1971, 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996, and 2001). Each of these confidential files, resident at Statistics Canada, represents a 20 percent sample of the Canadian population (except for the 1971 file, which

15 14 represents a 33.3 percent sample). Statistics Canada provides Public Use Microdata Files (PUMFs) to Canadian post-secondary institutions and to other researchers. The PUMFs use a much smaller sampling rate than the confidential files used in this paper. In particular, the 1971 PUMF comprises a 1.0 percent sample of the Canadian population, the 1981 and 1986 PUMFs comprise a 2.0 percent sample, the 1991 PUMF comprises a 3.0 percent sample, the 1996 PUMF comprises a 2.8 percent sample, and the 2001 PUMF comprises a 2.7 percent sample. Our study of the U.S. labor market uses the 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000 Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample (IPUMS) of the decennial Census. The 1960 file represents a 1 percent sample of the U.S. population, the 1970 file represents a 3 percent sample, and the 1980 through 2000 files represent a 5 percent sample. 9 For expositional convenience, we will refer to the data from these five Censuses as the 5 percent file, even though the 5/100 sampling rate only applies to the data collected since We restrict the empirical analysis to men aged 18 to 64 who participate in the civilian labor force. The Data Appendix describes the construction of the sample extracts and variables in detail. Our analysis of the U.S. data uses the convention of defining an immigrant as someone who is either a noncitizen or a naturalized U.S. citizen. In the Canadian context, we define an immigrant as someone who reports being a landed immigrant (i.e., a person who has been granted the right to live in Canada permanently by immigration authorities), and is either a noncitizen or a naturalized Canadian citizen We created the 3 percent 1970 sample by pooling the 1/100 Form 1 state, metropolitan area, and neighborhood files. These three samples are independent, so that the probability that a particular person appears in more than one of these samples is negligible. 10 Since 1991, the Canadian Censuses include non-permanent residents. This group includes those residing in Canada on an employment authorization, a student authorization, a Minister s permit, or who were refugee claimants at the time of Census (and family members living with them). Non-permanent residents accounted for 0.7,

16 15 A. National Labor Market As noted earlier, Borjas (2003) suggests that the wage impact of immigration can perhaps best be measured by looking at the evolution of wages in the national labor market for different skill groups. He defines skill groups in terms of both educational attainment and work experience to allow for the possibility that workers who belong to the same education groups but differ in their work experience are not perfect substitutes We group workers in both the Canadian and U.S. labor markets into five education categories: (1) high school dropouts; (2) high school graduates; (3) workers who have some college; (4) college graduates; and (5) workers with post-graduate education. We group workers into a particular years-of-experience cohort by using potential years of experience, roughly defined by Age Years of Education 6. Workers are aggregated into five-year experience groupings (i.e., 1 to 5 years of experience, 6 to 10 years, and so on) to incorporate the notion that workers in adjacent experience cells are more likely to affect each other s labor market opportunities than workers in cells that are further apart. The analysis is restricted to persons who have between 1 and 40 years of experience. Our classification system implies that there are 40 skill-based population groups at each point in time (i.e., 5 education groups 8 experience groups). Note that each of these skill-based national labor markets is observed a number of times (6 cross-sections in Canada and 5 crosssections in the United States). There are, therefore, a total of 240 cells in our analysis of the national-level Canadian data and 200 cells in our analysis of the U.S. data. 0.4 and 0.5 percent of the samples in 1991, 1996 and 2001, respectively, and are included in the immigrant counts for those years.

17 16 Remarkably, even at the level of the national labor market, the sampling error in the immigrant share attenuates the wage impact of immigration. We begin our discussion of the evidence with the Canadian data because we have access to extremely large samples of the Canadian census. Table 1 summarizes the distribution of the immigrant share variable across the 240 cells in the aggregate Canadian data. The first column of the table shows key characteristics of the distribution calculated using the large file resident at Statistics Canada. These data indicate that 19.1 percent of the male workforce is foreign-born in the period under study, and that the variance of the immigrant share is The remaining columns of the top panel show what happens to this distribution as we consider progressively smaller samples of the Canadian workforce. In particular, we examine the distribution of the immigrant share when we use data sets that comprise a 5/100 random sample of the Canadian population, a 1/100 random sample, a 1/1000 random sample, and a 1/10000 random sample. For each of these sampling rates, we drew 500 random samples from the large Statistics Canada files, and the statistics reported in Table 1 are averaged across the 500 replications. One of the replications reported in the table is of particular interest because it is the sampling rate used by Statistics Canada when they prepare the publicly available PUMF (roughly a 1 to 3 percent sample throughout the period). We drew 500 replications using the PUMF sampling rate and also report the resulting statistics. Before proceeding to a discussion of the shifts that occur in the distribution of the immigration share variable as we draw progressively smaller samples, it is worth noting that 11 The regressions presented below are weighted by the number of native workers used to calculate the mean log weekly wage of a particular skill cell. To maintain consistency across all calculations, we use this weight throughout the analysis (with only one exception: to give a better sense of the distribution of cells, the percentiles of the immigrant share variable reported in Tables 1 and 3 are not weighted). We also normalized the sum of weights to equal 1 in each cross-section to prevent the more recent cross-sections from contributing more to the estimation simply because each country s population increased over time. The results are not sensitive to the choice of weights.

18 17 seemingly large sampling rates (e.g., those available in the PUMF) generate a relatively small sample size for the average cell even at the level of the national Canadian labor market. Put differently, because the Canadian population is relatively small (31.0 million in 2001), nationallevel studies that calculate the immigrant share using the publicly available data will introduce substantial sampling error into the analysis. For example, the large Census files maintained at Statistics Canada yield a per-cell sample size of 30,416 observations. The PUMF replications, in contrast, give a per-cell sample size of 3,247 observations. The number of observations per cell declines further to 1,400 in the 1/100 replication, to 140 in the 1/1000 replication, and to 14 in the 1/10000 replication. As we showed in the previous section, the importance of sampling error in generating biased coefficients becomes exponentially greater as the average cell size declines, so that national-level studies of the labor market impact of immigration in Canada could be greatly affected by attenuation bias. Not surprisingly, Table 1 shows that the mean of the immigrant share variable is estimated precisely regardless of the sampling rate used. It is notable that the variance of the immigrant share variable increases only slightly as the average cell size declines, from in the large files resident at Statistics Canada to in the 1/100 replications and to in the 1/1000 replications. It is tempting to conclude that because the increase in the variance of the immigrant share variable does not seem to be very large, the problem of sampling error in estimating the wage impact of immigration may be numerically trivial. We will show below, however, that even the barely perceptible increase in the variance reported in Table 1 can lead to very large numerical changes in the estimated wage impact of immigration. The other statistics reported in Table 1 illustrate the shifting tails of the distribution of the immigrant share as we draw smaller samples. In particular, an increasing number of cells report

19 18 either very low or very high immigrant shares. In the Statistics Canada files, for example, the 10 th percentile cell has an immigrant share of 12.3 percent. In the 1/1000 replications, the 10 th percentile cell has an immigrant share of 11.2 percent, so that more cells now have few, if any, immigrants. Similarly, at the upper end of the distribution, the 90 th percentile cell in the Statistics Canada files has an immigrant share of 36.6 percent. In the 1/1000 replication, however, the 90 th percentile cell has an immigrant share of 38.8 percent, so that the cells at the upper end of the distribution are now much more immigrant-intensive. The data for the U.S. labor market tell the same story. As with our analysis of the Canadian data, we use the 5/100 file to draw 500 random samples for each sampling rate: 1/100, 1/1000, and 1/ Even though the size of the U.S. population is almost 10 times larger than that of Canada, note that it is not difficult to obtain samples where the cell size falls sufficiently to raise concerns about the impact of attenuation bias even in studies of national labor markets. The 5/100 files in the United States, for instance, lead to 47,564 observations per cell. The percell number of observations falls to 11,746 in the 1/100 replication, to 1,175 in the 1/1000 replication, and to 117 in the 1/10000 replication. In the United States, as in Canada, the mean of the immigrant share distribution remains constant and the variance increases only slightly as we consider smaller sampling rates. There is also a slight fattening of the tails so that more cells contain relatively few or relatively many immigrants. Let w sxt denote the mean log weekly wage of native-born men who have education s, experience x, and are observed at time t. We stack these data across skill groups and calendar years and estimate the following regression model separately for Canada and the United States:

20 19 (9) w sxt = p sxt + S + X + T + (S X) + (S T) + (R T) + sxt, where S is a vector of fixed effects indicating the group s educational attainment; X is a vector of fixed effects indicating the group s work experience; and is a vector of fixed effects indicating the time period. The linear fixed effects in equation (9) control for differences in labor market outcomes across schooling groups, experience groups, and over time. The interactions (S T) and (X T) control for the possibility that the impact of education and experience changed over time, and the interaction (S X) controls for the fact that the experience profile for a particular labor market outcome may differ across education groups. Note that the regression specification in (9) implies that the labor market impact of immigration is identified using time-variation within education-experience cells. The standard errors are clustered by education-experience cells to adjust for possible serial correlation. The regressions weigh the observations by the sample size used to calculate the log weekly wage. We also normalized the sum of weights to equal one in each cross-section. The top panel of Table 2 reports our estimates of the coefficient in the Canadian labor market. Column 1 presents the basic estimates obtained from the very large files maintained by Statistics Canada. The coefficient is , with a standard error of We also estimated the auxiliary regression of the immigrant share on all the other regressors in equation (9). The R- squared of this auxiliary regression (reported in row 4) was 0.967, suggesting that the attenuation 12 It is easier to interpret this coefficient by converting it to a wage elasticity that gives the percent change in wages associated with a percent change in labor supply. Borjas (2003, pp ) shows that this elasticity equals (1 p) 2. Since the average immigrant share is around 0.2 for Canada, the coefficients reported in Table 2 can be interpreted as wage elasticities by multiplying the coefficient by approximately 0.6.

21 20 bias caused by sampling error could easily play an important role in the calculation of the wage impact of immigration even for relatively large samples. We then estimated the regression model in each of the 500 randomly drawn samples for each sampling rate, and averaged the coefficient ˆ across the 500 replications. The various columns of the top panel of Table 2 document the impact of measurement error as we estimate the same regression model on progressively smaller samples. Consider initially the sampling rate that leads to the largest cell size: a random sample of 5/100 (proportionately equivalent to the largest samples publicly available in the United States). As Table 2 shows, the estimated wage impact of immigration already falls by 7.7 percent; the coefficient now equals and has an average standard error of Even when the immigrant share is calculated using an average cell size of 7,001 persons, therefore, sampling error has a numerically noticeable effect on the estimated wage impact of immigration. The attenuation becomes more pronounced as we move to progressively smaller samples. Consider, in particular, the results from the 500 replications that use the PUMF sampling rate. These results are worth emphasizing because this is the largest sampling rate that is publicly available in Canada. The average estimated coefficient drops to (or a 20.5 percent drop from the estimate in the far larger Statistics Canada files). The typical researcher using the largest publicly available random sample of Canadian workers would inevitably conclude that immigration had a much smaller numerical impact on wages. 14 In fact, we can drive the estimate 13 Note that the average standard error (across the 500 replications) is always larger than the standard deviation of the estimated coefficient across the 500 replications. We suspect that part of this difference arises because of the conservative approach that STATA uses when it computes clustered standard errors. 14 This is not idle speculation. Bohn and Sanders (2005) attempt to replicate the national-level Borjas framework on the publicly available Canadian data and conclude that immigration has little impact on the Canadian wage structure. If we estimate the model on the replication that is, in fact, publicly available, the estimated

22 21 of to zero by simply taking smaller sampling rates. The 1/1000 replication uses 140 observations per cell to calculate the immigrant share variable. The average coefficient is , with an average standard error of The 1/10000 replication has only 14 observations per cell and the average coefficient is , with an average standard error of It is easy to show that the substantial drop in the estimated wage impact of immigration as we move to progressively smaller random samples can be attributed to sampling error. Because we have access to the true immigrant shares in Canada (i.e., the immigrant shares calculated from the large Statistics Canada files), we can correct for measurement error by simply running a regression that replaces the error-ridden measure of the immigrant share with the true immigrant share in each of our replications. The distribution of the coefficient from this regression,, is reported in rows 5-7 of Table 2. In every single case, regardless of how small the sampling rate is, we come very close to estimating the true coefficient although there is a great deal of variance in the estimated wage impact across the replications. In particular, the coefficient estimated in the Statistics Canada file is If we used the correct immigrant share in the 1/100 replications the estimated coefficient is , and the standard deviation of this coefficient across the 500 replications is Similarly, if we used the correct immigrant share in the 1/1000 replication, the estimated coefficient is , and the standard deviation of this coefficient is Even in the 1/10000 replication, with only 14 observations per cell, the use of the true immigrant share leads to a coefficient that is much closer to the true wage impact (although it is very imprecisely coefficient is , with a standard error of It is worth noting that, in addition to the increased sampling error, there are other notable differences between the Statistics Canada file and the publicly available PUMF. In particular, the detailed information that is provided for many of the key variables (e.g., years of schooling and labor force activity) in the Statistics Canada file is not available in the PUMF file because the values for some variables are reported in terms of intervals.

23 22 estimated): the coefficient is , with a standard deviation of In sum, Table 2 provides compelling evidence that sampling error in the measure of the immigrant share can greatly attenuate the estimated wage impact of immigration. Of course, the typical analyst will not have access to the true immigrant share in the Statistics Canada file so that this method does not provide a practical way for calculating consistent regression coefficients. It is important, therefore, to consider alternative methods of correcting for attenuation bias. Equation (7) provides a simple solution to the problem as long as the measurement error is attributable solely to sampling error and no other variables are measured with error. 15 In particular, we can do a back-of-the-envelope prediction of what the coefficient would have been in the absence of sampling error. This exercise requires information on the immigrant share in the population, the observed variance of the immigrant share, the R 2 from the auxiliary regression, and average cell size. We calculated the corrected coefficient for each of the 500 replications at each sampling rate. Row 8 of Table 2 reports the average corrected coefficient and row 9 reports the standard deviation across replications. Alternatively, we can directly estimate the mean of the sampling error defined in equation (4) by using the available information on immigrant shares and cell size for the K cells in the analysis. More precisely, let: (10) (1 ) E = nk k k k p (1 p ) / n k k k k k k, 15 Some of the replications combine samples collected at different sampling rates. The sampling rate is set at 0.20 for the corrections in the Canada Statistics file; for the corrections in the PUMF replication; and 0.05 for the corrections in the 5/100 file for the United States.

24 23 where the weight k gives the number of native workers in cell k and the sum of the weights is normalized to one in each cross-section. We calculate the expectation in (10) for each of the 500 replications at each sampling rate. We then use this statistic to adjust the estimated coefficient ˆ in each replication. Row 10 of the table reports the average corrected coefficient and row 11 reports the standard deviation. Note that this calculation can generate imprecise results (particularly for small samples) because we are using the observed immigrant share p k as an estimate of the true share k. If, for example, both the true immigrant share and cell size in market k are relatively small, the observed immigrant share will likely be zero and this particular cell will not contribute to the calculation of the mean sampling error. The corrected coefficients reported in Table 2 reveal that even the coefficients estimated using the large files resident at Statistics Canada are not immune to sampling error. Although the bias is not large, using either of the correction methods described above suggests that the true wage impact of immigration in Canada is -0.52, implying an attenuation bias of 2.5 percent even with a cell size of over 30,000 persons. Both methods of correction generate adjusted coefficients that typically approximate this true effect as long as the mean cell size is large, but are much less precise when the mean cell size declines. A useful rule of thumb seems to be that one needs at least 1,000 observations per cell in order to predict the true coefficient with some degree of accuracy. In the 5/100 replication, for example, both correction methods lead to adjusted coefficients of around At the PUMF sampling rate, the inconsistent coefficient ˆ is The average adjusted coefficient is if we use the back-of-the-envelope approach in equation (7), or if we use the more complex approach in equation (10). Both adjusted coefficients are further off the mark if we move to the

25 24 1/100 replications. The estimates are and -0.69, respectively, with very large standard deviations. Finally, if the cell size gets sufficiently small, as in the 1/1000 replication, both correction methods break down. At this sampling rate, the predicted amount of sampling error often exceeds the adjusted variance of the observed immigrant share, leading to very unstable corrections. 16 It is of interest to compare these corrections to those obtained from a more sophisticated approach based on instrumental variables. The IV approach for correction of attenuation bias, first proposed by Griliches and Mason (1972), requires that we observe two measures of the variable subject to measurement error. The two measures have the property that they are correlated with each other, but have uncorrelated measurement errors. The second measure is then used as an instrument for the first to correct for the attenuation bias. We employ the unbiased split sample instrumental variable (USSIV) method to correct for attenuation bias (Angrist and Krueger, 1995). In our context, this method essentially boils down to splitting each sample randomly into half samples and using observed immigrant shares from the second half sample as instruments in the first half sample. More formally, for a given replication we first split the sample randomly into two parts. For labor market k, let 1 pk and 2 p k be the observed immigrant shares in the first and second half samples. Both 1 pk and 2 p k are measures of the true immigrant share such that p = + u and 1 k k 1 k p = + u. For a given 2 k k 2 k labor market k, 1 pk and 2 p k are correlated, but the measurement errors 1 uk and 2 u k are uncorrelated 16 Although there is relatively little difference in the adjustments implied by the two corrections for large samples, the back-of-the-envelope approach in equation (7) provides better estimates of the true wage impact of immigration for medium-sized samples. The likely reason is that the use of cell-level information on the immigrant share introduces inaccuracies in the calculation of the mean binomial error that are washed out by simply using the mean immigrant share in the entire sample.

26 25 because the half samples are drawn randomly. We then use the data from the first half sample to estimate: (11) w = p + S + X + T + ( S X) + ( S T) + ( X T) sxt sxt sxt and instrument 1 p sxt with 2 p sxt. For a given sampling rate, we estimated equation (11) for each of the 500 replications. We also applied this method in the Statistics Canada file by creating 500 half sample pairs from the Statistics Canada file using different random number generators and then estimating the USSIV corrected coefficients for each case. 17 The estimated USSIV regression coefficients are reported in row 12 of Table 2 (and the standard deviation is reported in row 13). For larger sampling rates, the USSIV estimates are very similar to those estimated using the simpler back of the envelope corrections. Consider, for instance, the results obtained in the PUMF replication. The coefficient estimated in the regression that uses the mismeasured immigrant share variable is ; the back-of-the-envelope correction in row 7 yields a predicted coefficient of ; and the USSIV method yields a prediction of Note, however, that the USSIV method breaks down as the cell size becomes smaller. In the 1/1000 replication, for example, the mean USSIV coefficient changes sign and becomes As noted above, the 17 In the U.S. context, the analogous procedure is to create 500 half sample pairs from the 5/100 data using different random number generators and then estimate the USSIV corrected coefficients for each case. 18 It is also possible to use instruments based on the economics of the model, rather than the purely statistical approach in USSIV, to correct for measurement error bias. We will discuss below the problems introduced by sampling error when one uses the preferred instrument in the literature, a lagged measure of the immigrant share in labor market k. 19 The average coefficient across the 500 replications is generally similar to the median for sufficiently large sampling rates. In the Canadian data, for example, the mean and median estimates for the 1/100 sampling rate

27 26 various methods of correction tend to work only when the average cell in the Canadian national labor market has at least 1,000 observations. The bottom panel of Table 2 replicates the analysis using the data available for the U.S. labor market. Note that our largest sample is the publicly available IPUMS of the decennial Census which represents a 1% sampling rate in 1960, a 3% sampling rate in 1970, and a 5% sampling rate from 1980 through The estimate of the wage impact of immigration at the national level in this large sample is quite similar to that found with the Statistics Canada data: the estimated coefficient is , with a standard error of Note, however, that because of the much larger U.S. population, the mean cell size is far larger (47,514 observations) than the mean cell size in the Statistics Canada file (30,416 observations). Note also that applying any method of correction to the coefficient estimated in this very large U.S. sample only slightly increases the estimated wage impact of immigration to just under As with Canada, we estimated the model using 500 replications for each smaller sampling rate. The 1/100 replications have 11,746 observations per cell. As a result, the estimated coefficient ˆ declines only slightly. The cell size in the 1/1000 replications, however, is much smaller (1,175 observations per cell), and the estimated coefficient falls to , with an average standard error of In other words, the bias attributable to sampling error reduces the coefficient by almost 30 percent. Studies that use this sampling rate even if they focus on national labor market trends and have over 1,000 observations per cell will falsely conclude that the wage impact of immigration is numerically weak and statistically insignificant. Table 2 shows that we can drive the estimated wage impact of immigration to zero by simply taking an even smaller sampling rate. The 1/10000 replication, where the average cell size used to are and respectively. The mean and median estimates, however, are and for the 1/1000